Run Power: Data Field

wvernon thanks for the feedback. I agree that visuals are very important (this is an app for a wearable, after all), so I'd like to continue improving the UX, as long as there's sufficient interest.

To make it clear, I'm happy to make an app that is useful, but I would also like there be enough interest to make it feel like the effort was worth it. OTOH, this is no dwMap or even Dozen Run, so I don't think accepting donations is worth the trouble (taxes, Paypal cuts, etc.). In a perfect world, I would love it if I could just magically receive a Stryd, Fenix 5+, and 645 Music to test, with no obligations or effort, but it doesn't work that way. Besides, I doubt I could get enough donations right now to cover even a Stryd.

Besides, I don't think this app is worth paying for. If I'm being honest, I threw together the initial version in a few hours, using parts of other apps I already made. Sure, it took time to develop those other apps, but those apps also happen to be free and have extremely tiny user bases, so their value is dubious.

EDIT - BTW, stryd should be paying you for doing this not you worrying about being sued for plugging the gaps in their IQ field!

All I can say is that would never happen. Not to state the obvious, but there isn't a company in the world that wouldn't happily accept free labour from customers and developers (*), but it doesn't work the other way around (**). Some optional task costs them money, they won't do it. Someone else threatens their bottom line, they'll squash them. I do agree that they probably couldn't care less if I figure out how they send elevation to their app, since people are paying for their hardware, not their app. But then again, even the standard ANT+ profiles are not public information (although they are freely available with registration), so there is a line somewhere that can't be crossed.

Stryd was very happy to mention another app of mine when they thought it could help their users ("How can I see lap/avg power in a second data field?"), but they didn't bother to even contact me first to see what I thought, otherwise they would've known that they provided incorrect information which made half of their advice useless. Even after I left a comment with a correction (more free labour), they still haven't fixed the article. Of course, they could've just made their own app to do so, but that would cost $$$. So that shows you what they think of their paying customers and/or some rando dev that made an app they thought they could use in a support article they whipped up in 30 seconds and never bothered to revisit. They could've taken an extra 5 minutes to send me an email, but that would cost $$$.

(*) Isn't this inherent in the concept of an app store where most of the apps are free? Or smartphone app stores where Google and Apple take a cut? Or user-to-user forums, where people help each other for free, saving companies a ton of money in support.

Another example is is the self-serve checkout lines at groceries. I think we all know that we are literally doing their work for them so they can cut labour costs (screwing over our most vulnerable workers) and not even pass on the difference to us..

(**) Again using forums as an example, there have been multiple posting issues for over a year, some of which may never be fixed. It takes a lot more time, effort and aggravation to post on these forums than it should, which is a kind of tax on niceness. It would be a lot easier to just not participate in the community....

I could point to other examples of companies that would happily use free software in their paid products but refuse to follow simple licensing requirements like including some attribution text in advertising.

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EDIT: And as an indie dev I am no different, since sometimes users are basically beta testing my apps for me. Especially when I ask them to download a debug build and send me logs, which is something that is incredibly annoying for people. But in then end it's Garmin that benefits from having the app store. I'm not sure how many devs make it relatively big like the author of dwMap, but it's got to be less than 0.01%.

Update 6.0

Vastly improve appearance of 6-field layout, for most current round watches. e.g. 935, Fenix 5 / 5X / 5+ / 645.

Not yet: Fenix 5S, older watches (Fenix 3, 230, etc.)

I tried to address all the concerns / complaints, while still making things not look weird, so:
- The labels/values for the top and bottom rows have been inverted, so you can have "59:59" without shrinking the font.
- Everything is initially centred based on the width of the top and bottom fields, so things look nice...
- ...but! If one of the center fields has a large number like "9:59:59", then that field uses the whole width (and is now appropriately left/right-justified), so the whole thing can fit without shrinking text

The new layout is the default and is now called "6 Fields A". If anyone liked the old layout for some reason, it is now available as "6 Fields B".

The only sacrifice is that labels are shorter now.
- "Avg Power" is now "APwr"
- "Min Power" is now "-Pwr"
- "L Lap Max Pwr" is now "LL+Pwr".

Oh, and some of the labels may be cut off prematurely. You can already see "Pwr Zn" has a couple of pixels shaved off. If this becomes too annoying or unusable, please let me know.

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TODO: Update Fenix 5S, older watches (Fenix 3, 230, 630, 735XT, etc.)

6 Fields A:


6 Fields A ("59:59")


6 Fields A ("9:59:59")



6 Fields B:

Hello, the new 6 field A layout looks great. But I noticed when Lap options are selected in the datafield, the labels shows as "L null"

Flowstate, for the power alerts, when you are out side of a set power range, how frequent does the power alerts comes up when you are outside of the predefined range? I noticed the alerts may take sometime to popup when I'm out of the set range.

jtsang thanks for the bug report, I've fixed that problem as well as a VA3 crash. The store has been updated.

Re: alerts. As explained in the thread and on the store page Q & A, Run Power basically does the same thing as the current 935 behaviour:
When you are outside of your target zone:
- You get alerts every 30 seconds, up to three times
- The first alert comes at 30 seconds
- The 30-second timer and "3 times" counter are reset if you go back to your target zone

This may not be perfect, but it seems like a lot of people hated the old 230 behaviour where it just alerted you instantly and an indefinite number of times. This way smooths out a lot of the issues with data that fluctuates, for example.

jtsang thanks for the bug report, I've fixed that problem as well as a VA3 crash. The store has been updated.

Re: alerts. As explained in the thread and on the store page Q & A, Run Power basically does the same thing as the current 935 behaviour:
When you are outside of your target zone:
- You get alerts every 30 seconds, up to three times
- The first alert comes at 30 seconds
- The 30-second timer and "3 times" counter are reset if you go back to your target zone

This may not be perfect, but it seems like a lot of people hated the old 230 behaviour where it just alerted you instantly and an indefinite number of times. This way smooths out a lot of the issues with data that fluctuates, for example.

Great. Thanks for the explanation on the alerts and I can confirm the lap label issue is fixed now on my Fenix 5plus.

FlowState ok, so if you're interested to try this, drop me a line and I will try to serve as a test mule. Might work or might be nothing useful comes out of it.

The main interest for me is to improve the user experience of running with power, and to allow user choice to tailor the experience. I still feel that downhill power is a fair bit underestimated, even though Stryd managed to improve the model from what it was from the start.

http://www.georgeron.com/2017/12/stryd-running-power-model.html

"C) Some reports indicate runners losing RPE-power correlation for gradient running. This begs the question whether the scaling factors should be something that is best left for the runner to tune and calibrate through the settings instead of being driven down from Stryd. "

I'm not the author of that review. But I've seen him post on Stryd forum before.

Update 6.3

- Improve 6 field layout for Fenix 5S, 230/235/630/735

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JTH9 thanks a lot for the offer! That's an interesting review. I'll look into it.

Update 6.4

Add 4B, 6C layouts with large numbers. (For current round watches, except Fenix 5S).

4B = Up to 4 large numbers [IMG2=JSON]{"data-align":"none","data-size":"full","src":"https:\/\/i.postimg.cc\/T2k864Ls\/layout4b.png"}[/IMG2]



6C = Up to 2 large numbers [IMG2=JSON]{"data-align":"none","data-size":"full","src":"https:\/\/i.postimg.cc\/c4jVKtcM\/layout6c.png"}[/IMG2]



Gallery with all the layouts: https://postimg.cc/gallery/2imt4jk4o/